Lightyear 2025 Year In Review

As each year comes to a close, I’m reminded of how grateful I am to be on this Lightyear journey—and how exceptional the team around me truly is. In 2025, we launched a marquee new product, shipped some of our most impactful updates in years, and began transforming our own internal operations. Those efforts culminated in a number of momentous business milestones. Our oft-articulated vision of becoming the Telecom Operating System for the enterprise is finally starting to take visible shape. I’m entering 2026 with unbridled optimism regarding our ability to actualize our mission.

Lightyear’s 2025 Product Releases

Launched Expense Management: The First AI-Native System to Automate Telecom Billing and Payments

Telecom Expense Management (TEM) software is not only as boring as it gets, but also as ubiquitous and impactful as it gets. TEM systems have been around for decades, and haven’t seen innovation in decades. Today, businesses continue to struggle immensely with a seemingly simple problem set: accessing carrier invoices, allocating costs accurately, auditing for errors, and making on-time payments. In December, we launched Lightyear Expense Management, the first AI-native TEM platform that leverages telecom-optimized LLMs to automate invoice processing, cost allocation, auditing / variances, and much more while embedding seamlessly into Lightyear’s full lifecycle management platform.

End-to-End Bulk Internet Procurement

Lightyear’s new bulk site procurement experience makes RFPs for 10, 100, or 1,000+ internet connections as easy as a single site RFP. You can now leverage Lightyear to create bulk site RFPs in minutes with templatized site configurations, letting the platform do the hard work of vendor strategy optimization, quote collection, and implementation management.

Embedded Support for Circuit KMZ Retrieval, Storage, and Analysis

In the past several years, we’ve seen enterprises care more and more about network diversity and uptime, and as a consequence, pour significantly more resourcing into route diligence via KMZ evaluation. Now, the Lightyear platform can store, organize, and analyze KMZ files on your behalf. Routes can be visualized directly in the platform, route overlap is calculated automatically, and route augmentations can be accomplished in partnership with Lightyear. Once a circuit is installed, KMZ files and route details are stored in your Network Inventory.

Internal AI Operational Transformation

We’ve begun leveraging telecom-optimized LLMs to transform our internal processes from top to bottom - how we ship product, how we sell / market, how we ensure contract accuracy, how we keep implementations organized, and much more. This may seem like a general productivity gain, but more importantly it allows us to scale up the benefits of our operational oversight to more customers at a higher quality bar. We’re only at the very tip of the iceberg on what can be achieved on this front.

There’s a lot more to mention as far as product milestones go, including improvements to how we track static IPs, significant API enhancements, lots of infrastructural changes, and much more, but the highlights are captured above.

Lightyear’s 2025 Business Milestones

Accelerated Revenue Growth Relative to 2024

Growing enterprise momentum and brand visibility alongside a more complete product offering culminated in us accelerating growth relative to 2024. Network transformation initiatives and private cloud deployments, many of relevance to AI, also benefitted us.

Grew Headcount by >50%

We noted in our 2024 Series B announcement that we’d be investing aggressively behind our ability to serve customers, and that’s what exactly we did. In 2025, we grew headcount by >50% after a couple of years of more tepid headcount growth, expanding all segments of the organization.

Strengthened Our Balance Sheet at a Significantly Higher Valuation

All of the achievements above culminated in an opportunity to further strengthen our balance sheet at attractive terms. Toward the end of 2025, we raised additional capital at 2x our 2024 Series B valuation, affording us flexibility to invest even more aggressively in product depth and customer experience. Despite this, our commitment to financial discipline remains unchanged, as we achieved everything above while consuming less capital than in 2024.

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We are entering 2026 energized and narrowly focused on continuing to raise the bar for the enterprise telecom experience.